When it comes to image editors, Adobe Photoshop remains the gold standard for professionals. But for students, the amateur, or anyone starting their career, the $700 price tag (or even ~$200 with a student discount) is likely prohibitive. There are cheaper apps available, such as Acorn and Pixelmator, but they offer far fewer features.

Luckily, there’s GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) a completely free and open source image editor that nearly matches Photoshop’s versatility. It’s long been available on the Mac if you had X11 installed, but never looked the part of a high quality Mac app. That’s all changed with the latest 2.8.2 release of Gimp, which shipped as a fully native Mac app. That’s what prompted us to take a closer look at the most popular Photoshop alternate.

If you’ve ever been editing an image and found your eyedropper wandering outside the application window to all of the colors on your desktop and beyond, I can sympathize. You’re not the only one who’s wanted to extend the functionality of Photoshop’s color picker beyond the application and been frustrated when you just weren’t allowed to do that.

Well, be frustrated no more! Meet Frank DeLoupe, a menubar color picker that will work anywhere. Going by Frank for short, this app gives you Photoshop integration and the ability to copy a color’s code to your clipboard. With so much packed into such a tiny app, can Mr. DeLoupe really do it all, or will Frank fall on his face? (more…)

Time’s a very limited resource, and most of us are looking for ways to share extra minutes off our work whenever we can. Whether it’s with a text-expanding app, a web app, or a snippet library, there’s tons of ways software can speed you up, and it’s always great to find new ways to make your computer help you save time.

More often than not, though, these solutions are all over the place, and while they offer a speedy way to get the results you want, they aren’t very intuitive. For example, there are plenty of web apps out there that allow you to get CSS3 gradients, but in order to get exactly what you want, some require you to edit the code after you’ve mess around with its interface. So, wouldn’t it be cool if you could do it all from one application that you are already using? Wouldn’t it be cool to get almost-perfect results?

Of course it would. That’s why we were excited about CSS Hat. CSS Hat is not an app or a web app, but rather a Photoshop extension that’ll help you concentrate in your code and design rather than worry about vendor prefixes and RGBA vs HEX or the like. We don’t usually review Photoshop extensions, but since many of our readers use Photoshop and need an easier way to make CSS on their Macs, we thought you’d enjoy seeing our thoughts on our review copy of CSS Hat. (more…)

This week we dove deep into the Photoshop CS6 Beta preview and told you all about the great new features and changes (see that article here). This is one of the most dramatic updates Photoshop has seen in years. It sports a completely overhauled interface, lots of functionality improvements such as layer searching and group effects, and some awesome brand new features like Iris Blur.

Needless to say, there are a lot of great things to say about this new version, but oddly enough one topic that’s getting a ton of discussion around the web has nothing to do with any of these new features: the icon. Adobe has been giving us slight variations on the table of elements style icon theme for years and it appears that this time around they’re adding a thick border around the edge, a choice which has sent more than a few users hunting for good replacement options.

Today we want to know what you think of the new icon. Is it a decent evolution of what we’ve seen for the past few years or a hideous beast that you would never consider allowing to reside in your dock? Vote in the poll and then leave a comment below with your thoughts.

Since Adobe announced the beta for Photoshop CS6 a little over a week ago, it has been downloaded more than half a million times. Even if you’ve managed to miss the onslaught of tweets and reviews, the magnitude of eager testers should indicate how anxious photographers and designers were for an update to their beloved software.

A number of articles have been written that overview the new features and changes to CS6. After working with the beta every day for over a week, I will instead try to give my impressions on what features I find most useful and am actually incorporating into my workflow already. Read on to see what features have stood out to me.

Just 5 days after we wrote about the fact that Adobe was putting the finishing touches on Creative Suite 6, which promised to be their biggest update to the software package yet, Adobe has released the public beta of Photoshop CS6, the first of the new programs to hit consumers. The beta, which can be downloaded for free from Adobe’s website (you’ll have to have an Adobe ID, though, to download and register the demo), clocks in at just under 1 GB and runs on all multi-core Intel-based Macs with 1 GB or more of RAM installed (click on the image below to be linked).(more…)

Adobe has released the fourth incarnation of its popular photo editing software, Lightroom, with a wealth of new features, including improved support for video and a price tag that has been slashed in half compared to previous versions. The new version, Photoshop Lightroom 4, costs just $149 for the stand-alone version (an upgrade from Lightroom 3 costs $79, instead of $99 previously) and Adobe hopes that this lower price will coax amateur photographers who may want to start using a professional software package into buying it. Previous versions of the software were priced at $299, a steep sum for most people. The new pricing strategy may also be an attempt to compete with Apple’s Aperture, another favourite among photographers, which can be had off the Mac App Store for $79.99.

There is no shortage of screenshot apps for Macs. Whether you want something with a ton of functionality like LittleSnapper, something sweet and simple like Screeny or something free and fun like Skitch, Mac developers have you covered and have for years.

However, every screenshot app that I’ve ever used shares one attribute: the ultimate result of the screenshot is a flat image. With Page Layers, developer Ralf Ebert decided to take things a step further by allowing you to take layered screenshots of websites. Intrigued? Read on to see it in action.

If you scan the features page on the Adobe Photoshop CS5 website, you’ll find descriptions for almost 70 different features, everything from “Automatic lens correction” to “Fluid canvas rotation” to “Puppet warp.” But anyone who’s ever used Photoshop knows that 70 features is just the tip of the iceberg, and when you start to add the various options for each of those features, you’re talking about such a beastly bit of software that it sinks the hopes of any amateur who dares open it.

That’s where the Mac App Store comes in. With the Mac App Store’s democratization of the Mac software market, image-editing amateurs like me have access to a whole new range of “one trick ponies,” niche software that will do the one thing you’re looking for, and not a darn thing else.

It’s going to be the 800-pound gorilla in the room for the entirety of this article, so I’m just going to acknowledge it now: Photoshop. There. I said it.

Photoshop has been king of the computer graphics hill for a very long time. Even though other software exists, and other applications take more specialized approaches to creating digital graphics, in a professional environment it always comes back to Photoshop.

This article isn’t about Photoshop. And yet it kind of is. It’s about Acorn, the image editor for humans, from Flying Meat Software. Specifically it’s about version 3 of Acorn, and how this update brings Acorn so close to taking on Photoshop in the minds of so many people.